Nick Hornby and the Lit Bitches

Nick Hornby's Juliet, Naked is not the kind of comedy favored by the sprightly book group at my church. When the TV Oprah book club broke down and became decidedly episodic, we "Lit Bitches," as we call ourselves--the tolerant minister lists us as the "Lit Bits" in the bulletin--branched out from the Oprah selections that originally fueled our meetings to pop-literary novels like Hornby's How to Be Good, Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, and Richard Russo's Empire Falls.

I prefer Hornby's essays to his novels. His three collections of literary essays, The Polysyllabic Spree, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt, and Shakespeare Wrote for Money, originally published as book columns in The Believer, are funny, perceptive, and addictive. They made me laugh so hard I hurt. Well, sort of. I would want to quit reading one column and then read just one more...and then one more. He begins each essay with lists of Books Bought and Books Read, and of course they're seldom the same books. So I'd laugh away and I'd marvel at his insights.

My favorite Hornby novel is A Long Way Down. It's amusing but he obviously also understands depression. It's a darkish comedy: he follows the lives of four suicidal people who originally meet by accident on a roof on New Year's Eve.

Juliet, Naked is an even darker comedy, and actually not that comical. Parts are not funny at all, though there's always wit. Duncan and Annie, an unmarried couple who have been together for 15 years by default, don't love each other anymore. Annie knows it; Duncan doesn't. She is incredibly irritated by his obsession with Tucker Crowe, a has-been rock star who retired from his career mysteriously in 1986. Duncan, a college teacher who spends most of his time running a Tucker Crowe website, is jealous when Annie posts an articulate piece trashing a "new" album released to the fans. What he doesn't know is that Tucker Crowe has contacted Annie to say he agrees.

I understand Annie, an embittered woman who never got what she wanted from romance and is terrified by her emptiness and the fact that she hasn't had children. And I understand Duncan: it's easier for him to deal with internet people than real people and he has little interest in love and sex. I don't quite understand Tucker Crowe, though I like him and he seems as real as any rock star does to me: part of the confusion is that I just saw Crazy Heart and I kept picturing Jeff Bridges in the role.

Hornby twists away from the romantic conventions, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. The ending--well, it was unexpected. Perhaps this is Hornby's best book. Parts of it actually reminded me of Stephen Dixon's underrated work:
the same pared-down style and bitter humor.